Earlier in the year while surfing online for kayak fishing tips, I ran across the Boondoggle over at Yakangler.com. Based on the description (a weekend of camping and kayak fishing with like-minded folk) and the location at Merritt Island, FL, I signed us up immediately in August.

The plan was to take Friday off, leave Thursday after work and fish all day Friday, Saturday, and early Sunday.

As work would have it, I had a last minute trip to Vegas until late Thursday. After a delayed flight, I didn’t get home until midnight. Our options were sleep a bit and leave early or go ahead and get on the road. We opted for packing quickly and began our drive down from Atlanta at 2 AM.

The drive down was uneventful, thankfully, except for the pre-dawn fog in Florida. We arrived at the KARS campground late in the AM, checked in with the Boondoggle crew and set up camp.

We were beat and it was windy on Friday afternoon so we opted to chill on the pier a hundred yards from our tent.

It was great to relax and the fishing was good. We landed a small red, tarpon and the obligatory hardheads.

After a great conversation Friday night with local guide, Alex Gorichky, my son locked in on a particular species that he’d not caught before, which was the mangrove snapper.

Based on Alex’s recommendation, we hit the new boat ramp and pier at Jetty Park on Saturday. We caught a ton of fish, including a few keeper mangroves and a Jack Crevalle.

At sunset, we hit the beach and junior even hooked a small manta ray before we headed back to camp.

Saturday night we hit the tail end of the BBQ dinner and won a sweet Polar Bear cooler at the raffle. After the raffle, we stumbled our way back to our tent and passed out.

Sunday we fished a few minutes early, but packed up and hit the road by 10AM.

We had big plans to compete in the Battle for the Kayaks tournament down in Panama City Beach the weekend of September 19th, but work (Thursday) and baseball (Sunday) cut our trip short. Instead of canceling altogether, we decided to spend a day and a half fishing as much as we could and trying our new yaks offshore.

So we took off late Thursday after work and made the six hour trip down. The weather was pretty crappy Friday morning and we had no luck offshore. I can say that I caught my first squid from a yak though (no picture unfortunately). He squirted me a few times and then we parted ways.

After packing up our gear Saturday morning for the trip home, we decided to try our luck on the pier. The king mackerel bite was much slower than our July visit, but junior managed to land his largest king from the pier about an hour before we had to take off. This fish made the trip for us!

I even caught a little video action before I had to run and get the gaff. We’ll be back and I will get pulled by a king on the yak soon.